Milford residents protest variance

They say research lab would affect their rural way of life.

May 13, 2004|By Geoffrey F.X. O'Connell Special to The Morning Call - Freelance

Cold War tales of hardened bunkers and a peek inside the war on counterfeiting lent an air of intrigue to Tuesday night's five-hour zoning board hearing in Milford Township.

A developer's application for a variance to permit light industrial use on property zoned agricultural drew a standing room only crowd of Old Plains Road residents to protest.

The property is home to a 30,000-square-foot underground bunker that once served as a relay station for the historic White House-Kremlin communications link, or hotline, that was developed following the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Developer Frank Fox, a principal of Old Plains Road Associates, asked for the variance to lease the vacant facility to Authentix, a small research laboratory with offices in Bethlehem and Newark, N.J. The facility is on a 10-acre parcel at 1370 Old Plains Road.

Authentix develops chemical "markers" that help pharmaceutical companies fight counterfeiting of patented drugs. Authentix also developed some of the markers in the new counterfeit-resistant $20 and $50 bills.

By the time the gavel came down Tuesday, just short of midnight, half of the residents had yet to be heard, and an exhausted board decided to continue the hearing at 7 p.m. June 8.

Zoning board member Gary Bender resisted the effort. "We're not going to decide tonight," he said. "We haven't heard all the questions, and we have research to do."

Authentix Vice President Jim Rittenburg said his company wants to consolidate its Bethlehem and Newark offices into a single, secure facility.

"The thing that's attractive to us is that we're in the security business," Rittenburg said of the low-profile building tucked away on a country road. "In an office park, you don't know who is going to be your neighbor," he said.

Some residents of Old Plains Road have been wondering about their "neighbor" ever since a man knocked on Evelyn Schule's farmhouse door in the mid-1960s.

The stranger, Schule said at the hearing, told her she had to sell him some of her 50 or so acres in the interest of national security.

The stranger, it turns out, represented AT&T and was setting up an icon of the Cold War -- the White House-Kremlin communications link.

The nondescript bunker served as a relay station for the historic line and was built to be impervious to nuclear attack and had generators that could keep the operation going for weeks at a time, Fox said.

As the Cold War faded, need for the relay station eroded. In 2000, AT&T sold the property to American Tower, which had no use for the bunker, only the communications tower on the site.

Old Plains Associates bought the site in 2002.

Fox said he leased back the tower to the seller for $1 per year for 99 years and "quietly marketed" the bunker for 18 months before finding the security-conscious Authentix.

Resident Scott Travaline led a long line of speakers who said they opposed any nonagricultural use of the property.

"Our family way of life is going to be affected," Travaline said. He presented the board a petition signed by two dozen Old Plains Road residents opposing the variance.

Fox and Rittenburg agreed to limit the business to 15 employees and add no outside lighting or security alarms. They also promised not to fire up the giant generator turbines.

"There are worse uses," Fox responded. He said that a sales call center, for example, could fit the telecommunications exception that came in with the Cold War and that residents would be powerless to stop that.

Travaline said that residents believed the Cold War's intrusion on their rural way of life had ended with that conflict.